Altruism Is an Ideology Justifying Oppression and Alienation

The essay expresses the core of Stirner’s developing political critique of humanism. The crux of his argument is that altruism, or the founding of political legitimacy upon duty to others or to “society,” was the emerging ideology justifying oppression and alienation in modern political systems.

--John F. Welsh, Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 13.